Now that it is done, I realize that it was kind of nice having three days when I did not have to figure out what to write that day. Working from notes taken during VancouFur 2013 was surprisingly fun, and a pleasant little second vacation from having to cogitate up some content every day.

That also makes me realize that my typical feeling that my usual blogging is not worth very much may not be entirely true. Certainly, it takes a lot of creativity to come up with more things to write about every day. That has to count for something.

And of course, it’s all very good exercise for my writing muscles. It keeps them toned and tuned. It might not work them really hard compared to the sort of workout that writing actual fiction does, but what the heck, it still beats doing nothing with my so-called life.

Still, I feel slightly intimidated by having to fill up all those one thousand words off the cuff today, so it is good that I also have some links to share in order to help span the gap.

For instance, we have this cat, who came up with a novel way to irritate its humans into doing its bidding.

Oh, you little devil, you figured out how to knock on the door.

And I can totally imagine how this kitty figured this out. I know cats well, and I know they have a distinctive posture they assume when taking care of their more intimate cleansing, and I could easily see how a cat might be doing that while waiting for a human to come along and let them in. If they were being especially intense in their cleansing, a paw might well accidentally rap against the door loud enough for the humans inside to hear.

Someone opens the door to see what that noise was, and boom, kitty is inside.

But far more than that… kitty has finally managed to hack the system and find a way to make that damnable frustrating door open at will! Before this innovation, all the cat could do was meow at the door piteously and hope someone hears.

But now… kitty has the power! You knock, and they come! Sure, they seem kind of pissed off when they do, but that never lasts, and meanwhile, you are inside.

I think the only way to train the cat out of this obnoxious (but effective) behaviour would be to greet it with a bucket of water every time it “knocked”.

Then there is this little literary experiment from the pages of The Review Review (ha ha ha) called The New Yorker Rejects Itself.

Here;s the skinny : the writer of the article and literary experimenter, David Cameron, took a story that had been published in the New Yorker (widely recognized as the most chic place in the English speaking world to be published), gave it a new title and a fictional author, and sent it out to various publications both big and small to see if it would get accepted elsewhere.

After all, if it’s good enough for The New Yorker, it must be good enough for everywhere else, right?

But, shockingly (not really), it got rejected en masse. Not only did it not get accepted for publication anywhere (at which point Cameron would have instantly withdrawn it, otherwise he would have been guilty of plagiarism), it did not get so much as a nibble.

And if this surprises you, I applaud your innocence, but it does not surprise me at all.

We writer would like to think that somehow, the publishing world is a straightforward meritocracy, a nice neat ladder where the better the story is, the more you will get paid for it and the tonier the publication will be, and that is it.

But as Cameron admits himself at the end of the article, such naive assumptions deny the truth of the slush pile. The first gatekeepers of publication are low-paid, overworked first readers whose impossible job is to pick the few things worth passing up the food chain for the real editors to consider out of the mounds and mounds of submissions even a small press journal or tiny home press magazine gets.

See, the thing about the Internet is that it is full of very helpful lists of every damn publication out there, and that insures that every publication gets way more submissions than it can handle.

So to presume that the lowly human beings who have to go through hundreds of submissions, many mind-numbingly awful, can do this and maintain perfect objectivity is ridiculous.

This is reinforced by the fact that first readers are not judged by the objective criterion of literature, but by how many things which get published that they personally pass up the food chain.

And this is not a light judgment. It determines not just whether they get promoted but often whether or not they even get to keep their jobs. A first reader who does not find things the real editor likes risks getting replaced by someone who might.

And yes, that is all pretty depressing for those of us who want to get through those gates into the golden world of being published authors.

It means that no matter how excellent our story is, it still has to be lucky enough to land in front of the right first reader at the right time when they are in the right mood to like it, and contain nothing that will immediately piss them off and make them reject your story out of hand.

It makes it a numbers game, rather like job hunting. You have to send a lot of stories to a lot of places before you stand a chance of winning the publication lottery.

And the thing is, it still has to be good. A good story might only buy you a ticket, but without a ticket, you have no chance at winning at all.

This is what make self-publishing so appealing to me.